Time to go to bed. I'm wasting time torquing up another Mudcatter by highlighting her idiotic remarks. Note to self to forward to that person: if you're going to post a link to a place, it helps to at least READ the information about the place. You have a lot less egg on your face later on.

I've just heard the news, done dug up the dirt, They've got sway-hipped wahinis way out in the Oort, Dunno how they got there, it's a problem for the courts, But there's men of all sizes lining up hip to hip Just begging for a hitch on some big rocket ship They're giving theguys from NASA every kind of lip They're telling it long, and they're telling it short They wanna get a ride to the cloud of Oort To chase the svelte wahinis way out in the Oort.

given the size of CAI's I suspect light pressure over a few million years could drift them out into the oort cloud. Not to mention that comets swing in closer to the center of the system and could pick some up them....Why are scientists so surprised?

Haven't they ever dropped a bag of flour and found out how far the d*mn stuff can spread?

" calcium aluminum, which is among the oldest matter in the solar system"

Umm....where's the Ovaltine in that? (For some reason I was never impressed with Ovaltine -- the advertisements made me believe its purpose was to increase fertility in teenage girls, a development I opposed on principle.)

Was there any of that dust that Peter Pan sprinkled over Wendy, John, and Michael? Or are the scientists keeping that for themselves? And to find magnesium ovaltine in the dust demonstrates that the solar system can't be as old as they think.

Scientists used to think that the formation of the solar system was a fairly orderly affair. They were wrong. The analysis of comet dust collected by Stardust shows that things were much more chaotic 4.5 billion years ago.

There is something comforting about a theory. A good one, like Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, imposes order on a series of seemingly unrelated observations. A bad one, though, imposes order where there is none -- and that seems to be the situation now facing planetary scientists.

Material collected from the tail of the Wild 2 comet in 2004 by NASA's Stardust spacecraft has now been exhaustively examined. The results, published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, show that the formation of our solar system may not have been quite as orderly as researchers thought. The prevailing assumption had been that comets were made of space dust from outside the solar system. But scientists also found tiny bits of material forged in the ultra-hot inner solar system among the collected particles.

"It was extremely exciting," University of Washington astronomer Donald Brownlee, who headed up the research team which published in Science, told Reuters. "We expected the comet to be largely made out of interstellar grains, materials that formed before the solar system formed and were never really affected much by the solar system."

In other words, the primordial cloud of material, which 4.5 billion years ago became Mars, Earth, Jupiter and Neptune, was much less settled than first thought. Somehow, material created in the extreme temperatures near the sun was catapulted into the outer reaches of the solar system where the comets formed. Among the tiny granules collected by Stardust -- dust particles smaller than a grain of sand -- were bits of calcium aluminum, which is among the oldest matter in the solar system, and magnesium olivine, the greenish compound found in the sand of some beaches in Hawaii.

"You were transporting material over really big distances," Phil Bland, a scientist from Imperial College in London who was also involved in the research, told Reuters. "So that's kind of wacky for us planetary scientists."

(From Spiegel magazine)

I am waiting for an article headed "Solar System forced to rethink view of Scientists".

The switch-thingie on the power pole just outside the employees' entrance. It was broken, it was raining, and it was snapcracklepopping like crazy from the water dripping inside. The power company people said that it could have exploded at any time -- damaging the pole and the Library building, the Library's contents and computers, and incidentally my car. It also would have shut off power to about half the Old Town area.

Speaking of explosives, the cops arrested a guy yesterday who violated his probation by bringing an explosive device (CO2 cylinder filled with gunpowder and fused) on his visit to his probation officer.

Probably the brother of the guy who walked up the the West Entrance this morning, read the sign the we were closed for electrical repairs, and then walked around and tried to get in the East Entrance. You know, just because the place is closed on ONE side....

I tried to look up what that exciting event might have been by visiting the Idaho State Journal online, but it didn't offer much, news or anything else. Looks like an online presence isn't a high priority of theirs.

So what was it that didn't blow up (specific, not the world in general!)

My, but this has been an interesting day! We started by opening at 9 a.m., as usual, and closing it at 9:05 a.m. Then we re-opened about an hour later and have been open ever since, even though we'll close at 9 p.m. as usual. And for the first time is simply ages we had all of the computers, lights, and everything turned off.

Ode to Oxytocin

…To be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough… I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in the sea… All things please the soul, but these things please the soul well.

Hear,hear, MM!! Such aspersions from the uninitiated do not bode well for the future of the Saxon angle in MOAB, I must say!! He's lucky you have a firm grip on the wenches; if you were to let them out, they'd tear his testicles right out of his mouth!

Well, chaps, and I assume that you are all chaps for no lady would write something here, I had thought that I recognized "Phil the Pill" (as we called him in school). I see that I had mistaken one of you for him and for that I apologise most profusely indeed. He would regale us with stories of his amorous adventures and would quite keep the Common Room in stitches. His story of his outing with two sheep, a crofter's daughter, and a flock of geese, in which his activities were interrupted by both the crofter and a very large bull mastiff, is quite droll and classic. Some of his stories about the highjinks he and Liz did in the early years of their wedded bliss are also quite humourous -- the one about him hiding in the suit of armour and Liz inspecting the suits for "Sir Lotta Lance" leaves one quite breathless with laughter.

Of course, loyalty and the qualities of a gentleman prevent me from repeating any them.

May I assume that I have the honour of addressing His Royal Highness Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh and Consort of Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith?

The copywriters police, with their special punctuation squad will swoop into action. They estimate it will take roughly 19 billion years to disambiguate the internet, and the rest of the universe to make sense of MOAB.